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TauntaunScout
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Joined: 20 Apr 2015
Posts: 981
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 Posted: Fri Feb 26, 2021 2:19 pm Post subject: Finally got a SW display cabinet |
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I am (as I have previously mentioned) coming down pretty hard on a narrowly focused collection. Namely, this year I decided to narrow my SW collecting to the Hoth Ion Cannon from Kenner's Micro Collection line. This is predominantly a pre-production item collection.
I've got an engineering pilot of the playset and figures. This is one of the first 50 made overseas, sent back to Kenner for the final greenlight. The blast door feature doesn't hardly work, and the figures have a jaundiced look to them. Kenner fixed these problems before going full steam ahead into mass production. I have placed these, and a mint set of standard production figures, side by side so one can see the changes made.
There's also a set of 8 unpainted figures. Probably factory overstock. Next to these is a "Faux-up". A repro of a master 4-up: every figure was made 4x the final size to get the detail right. A ruber mold would be made to cast a half dozen or 4-ups. One would be used as a tooling master to be shrunk down with a pantograph. Another would be hand painted and shipped to Lucasfilm for approval. Others were just "mold insurance", or painted and sent to vendors, or used in other ways. Mine is a fake! It was cast from a homemade mold made by a Kenner employee who collected some of the tooling masters. I painted it myself to make a fake paint master for my cabinet. Don't worry, I clearly marked it "repro" and my initials and the year.
The sketch in the back is a photocopy from a late Kenner engineers personal sketchbook. The copy was made (and the original sketchbook donated to a museum) by his brother.
The tauntaun next to a little square is hard to make out in the pics, but that's a slide to use in a projector during Kenner boardroom meetings or something. The tauntaun figure is a chrome test paint. Metallic figures surface relatively regularly, they were probably used to figure out how to do R2 and 3PO.
https://imgur.com/TT86wWZ
https://imgur.com/d2GEVRw
https://imgur.com/8r3RoFj
https://imgur.com/i6SgXLs |
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Whill
Dark Lord of the Jedi (Owner/Admin)
Joined: 14 Apr 2008
Posts: 10434
Location: Columbus, Ohio, USA, Earth, The Solar System, The Milky Way Galaxy
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TauntaunScout
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Joined: 20 Apr 2015
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| Posted: Fri Feb 26, 2021 4:36 pm Post subject: Re: Finally got a SW display cabinet |
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Thanks. I have some other odds and ends that don't fit my focus but are a little too scarce to let go of. Possibly future trade bait. Right now I am just trying to buy a "real" 4-Up from the set.
Down the road I will try to just keep getting 4-Ups and squeezings. Squeezings look like production figures but they're like 1/10th of the weight. Hand cast in resin from the steel production molds, used internally at Kenner. A lot of the photos on box art probably featured hand painted squeezings. That way they could send hte painted resin figs to the photographer and set him to work, while the molds were off in some other country being used in mass production. |
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Grimace
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Joined: 11 Oct 2004
Posts: 729
Location: Montana; Big Sky Country
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| Posted: Fri Feb 26, 2021 10:47 pm Post subject: |
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| Cool! And a nice start to the display! |
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RyanDarkstar
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Joined: 04 Dec 2014
Posts: 351
Location: Chambersburg, PA, USA, Earth
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| Posted: Sun Feb 28, 2021 10:59 am Post subject: |
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I like it. Can't wait to see what other goodies find their way inside.
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Currently playing D&D 5E and painting an unholy amount of miniatures. |
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TauntaunScout
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Joined: 20 Apr 2015
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| Posted: Mon Mar 01, 2021 10:05 am Post subject: |
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| RyanDarkstar wrote: | | I like it. Can't wait to see what other goodies find their way inside. |
I went ahead and threw all my unpainted figures in there, some of which are from unreleased sets. Don't be fooled by high eBay prices that call these "prototypes" or "first shots". They are simply factory overstock in 99% of cases. The unreleased are rare indeed but ordinary production figures in an unpainted state aren't. If you look there's also a gold stormtrooper. Probably the most common test paint to surface is gold stormtroopers in that pose.
I also put in a sealed set of "Build Your Armies" figures together with a mint loose set. Just to take up space for now.
I won't really be acquiring anything new for a long time because I am saving up for another 4-Up. The one in the pics is a fake that i painted myself. I made a deal to buy a real green dynacast one, and that is sucking up all my fun money for now.
The bottom shelf is for my best dinosaurs, but that's another story.
https://imgur.com/pQrbERD
https://imgur.com/gciZkTD
https://imgur.com/xxRAe9h
This white Smilodon is THE original tho. Pretty proud of that jasper. He's the hand sculpted master one from the Marx factory from which the molds were made.
https://imgur.com/yHH3x0r |
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RyanDarkstar
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Joined: 04 Dec 2014
Posts: 351
Location: Chambersburg, PA, USA, Earth
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| Posted: Mon Mar 01, 2021 5:21 pm Post subject: |
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Awesome. I loved those dinosaurs as a kid. I'll have to see if one of my siblings still has them.
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Currently playing D&D 5E and painting an unholy amount of miniatures. |
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TauntaunScout
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Joined: 20 Apr 2015
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| Posted: Tue Mar 02, 2021 10:21 am Post subject: |
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| RyanDarkstar wrote: | | Awesome. I loved those dinosaurs as a kid. I'll have to see if one of my siblings still has them. |
Those *exact* dinos are "Rulers of the Earth" by Superior Toys. Superior bought the Marx molds and issued their own playsets in the 80's. If you had THOSE, they're pretty rare, in fact more valuable than an original 1950's Marx. They're what I had as a kid: the small 27 piece playset, though they also made other bigger ones I coveted as a child.
I also had two loose ones I got in a bin at KayBee. They were made by Whitehall Games, who ALSO briefly owned a few of the Marx molds.
The whole thing was so mysterious to a kid in the pre-internet era, those and Micro Collection have lodged in my brain pretty hard.
Micro Collection actually is what got me into gaming and a lifelong love of painting models.
At some point I realized an awful lot of my hobby pursuits were homages to those dinosaurs and Kenner Micro SW toys, so I decided I should drop the BS and be a hardcore collector of that stuff. |
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TauntaunScout
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Joined: 20 Apr 2015
Posts: 981
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| Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2021 7:58 pm Post subject: |
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I painted 3 more fake 4-Ups and put them in the display. Han Solo in Stormtrooper Armor (from the Death Star Compactor set), Bespin Guard (Unreleased) and R2-D2 (unreleased pose). Now, these are pretty far afield from my focus (Hoth Ion Cannon set) so I have put them on eBay, priced to the moon. If someone bites, I get money. If not, I get cool 4-ups.
https://imgur.com/I3K0BCG
https://imgur.com/B1avRAq |
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